Some food safety experts say Daily Harvest’s response time is reasonable for a case like this. The company and the FDA still have yet to determine what specifically is at issue with the tara. It took Daily Harvest a month after its June 17 email to publicly pinpoint tara flour, a plant-based protein in the crumbles, as the ingredient behind the outbreak. “Now they’re getting all of the hate.” Turning to Reddit “They’re getting battered through all these platforms where they gained all this love,” says Pallavi Kumar, a professor at American University’s School of Communication, whose specialties include crisis communications and social media. But now many of those same forces are lending a hand in its unraveling. Daily Harvest told employees during an all-hands meeting that the layoffs were planned before the crumbles issue and were related to the inflationary pressures the company had outlined at a previous meeting in May, according to a source familiar with the matter.Ĭrucial to the company’s growth to coveted unicorn status had been social media and the influencer economy. A source with knowledge of the situation said the cuts impacted 15% of its headcount. Last week, Daily Harvest announced layoffs. In November 2021, it closed its Series D round of funding, which valued the company at $1.1 billion. In the spring of 2020, even as it struggled with supply chain woes like dry ice shortages, Daily Harvest hit its sales goals for the entire year, said one former employee. As restaurants shut down and cooking at home got tedious, consumers looking for new and creative ways to stock their freezers flocked to the brand and its subscription boxes full of matcha lemongrass lattes ($5.99 for a two-pack), cherry açai smoothies ($8.49), and red cabbage and buckwheat donburi ($11.99). The crumbles fiasco struck Daily Harvest just as the company was riding a pandemic-fueled boom. “We used the most effective communication channels to notify customers directly and the recall was successful.” The company declined to comment further.įounded in 2015 by former Gilt Groupe marketing executive Rachel Drori, the company checked all the boxes of a startup born of Instagram: a direct-to-consumer brand replete with celebrity backers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, and Bobby Flay an army of influencers spreading its gospel and its own Instagram feed full of memes and stylized photos of overnight oats and chia bowls. “The goal of a recall is to ensure that people stop consuming the item,” the company said in a statement to Fortune. The company currently faces three active lawsuits related to the crumbles. Daily Harvest voluntarily recalled the crumbles in an email to customers on June 17, two months after a launch that touted their “.” But some consumers complain that the email was easy to miss and lacked urgency, and that Daily Harvest’s initial social media posts were slow to arrive and buried the warning. The crumbles, which resemble ground-up veggie burgers, are so far reported to have sickened nearly 500 people and sent 113 to the hospital, according to the U.S. More than 25 of his clients allege that they’ve had their gallbladders removed as a result of eating the product, he says. “This is the first time I’ve seen an outbreak figured out by social media,” says Bill Marler, a lawyer who says he’s representing some 350 people, including Silverman, who claim the crumbles made them sick. She then posted her own Instagram and TikTok video about the episode. “It did not click until I watched Abby’s video,” she says. Jenna Dargenzio, a content creator and jewelry designer, told Fortune she went to the ER twice in one day in May with intense stomach pain and didn’t suspect the crumbles until Silverman’s post. But instead, Silverman became a TikTok whistleblower of sorts: Her video went viral, with more than 1 million views and nearly 4,000 comments-including some thanking her for solving their own medical mysteries. Daily Harvest had sent her the package hoping she’d promote the food to her followers. After eating the crumbles on May 11, she said she’d suffered stomach pain so severe that she went to the ER twice, the second time with a high fever, and registered extremely elevated liver levels-an indication that her liver was not working properly.ĭespite her ordeal, Silverman had been nervous about publicly criticizing the brand her online persona is not controversial, she says. In a two-minute TikTok video, she told her nearly 120,000 followers that about a month earlier she’d received a free package from frozen vegan food delivery service Daily Harvest that included a new product-French Lentil + Leek Crumbles. But in mid-June, Silverman posted a piece of content that was off brand for her.
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